Annual Weather Patterns

Climatemaps visualizes the weather over the course of a year around the whole world. The map animates average global monthly climate data from 1961-1990 to show you when every location in the world has its hottest, driest or wettest weather.

You can select from a range of weather layers from the drop-down menu (including precipitation, cloud cover and average temperatures). You can then view the weather data animated on the map through a whole year (you might need to let the animation play through a couple of times before the layers load completely).

The map was made with the OpenLayers 3 map library with a little help from Tippecanoe to create the map tiles. Tippecanoe is a tool for building vector map tilesets containing large amounts of location data. It is a very efficient way to visualize very large data-sets on an interactive map with minimal impact on performance.

You can view a few over maps built with the help of Tippecanoe here.

Sailing the Seven Seas

The Climatological Database for the World's Oceans 1750-1850 is extracting meteorological data from historical ship logbooks. These historical records contain a wealth of data both about the routes taken by ships and the weather conditions encountered by the ships during their voyages.

Morgan Herlocker has taken the location data from these 100 years of ship logs and plotted them on a Mapbox map. The thousands of data points in Ships Logs have been processed into vector tilesets using tippecanoe.

One thing that clearly emerges from all this data is the routes of the major shipping lanes from 1750-1850.

Mapping the World's Wifi

Mapbox and Skyhook have teamed up to map the incredible number of wifi connections made by smart phones around the world. The World's Wifi map allows you to explore millions of wifi connections made in cities around the world.

The yellow dots on the World Wifi Map show wifi connections made in the last six months. The blue dots date back to 2013. The map includes quick links to zoom in on a number of different cities. If you zoom out on the map you can see that each city map also allows you to explore quite a large area around the selected city.

Plotting so much data on one map is made possible by Tippecanoe, which can make vector tilesets from large amounts of data. You can read more about the Skyhook data plotted on the map and how the map was made on the Mapbox Blog.

Rocking the Tippecanoe

Tippecanoe is a tool for building vector tilesets from large collections of GeoJSON features. Input GeoJSON into Tippecanoe and it will give you back a vector mbtiles file. It is a very efficient way to visualize very large data-sets on an interactive map with minimal impact on performance.

You can see the results of using Tippecanoe in this map of ADS-B pings in and around Los Angeles International Airport. Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) is one of the ways that aircraft report their in-flight positions. It is one of the technologies that make aircraft tracking maps like Flightradar24 possible.

I'm not sure how many ADS-B pings the Planes Over LA.2 map is showing but it's definitely enough to be able to clearly make out the flight paths in and out of Los Angeles International Airport.


Tippecanoe was originally developed by Eric Fischer at Mapbox to map 6 billion geo-tagged Twitter messages. The 6 Billion Tweets Map is a great visualization of Twitter's global appeal, showing where Twitter is popular and also where in the world the social network has yet to gain traction.


The Tippecanoe tool was also used by Mapbox to create the Superpowered 1.5 Million Walks, Runs, and Bike Rides map. This map overlays Runkeeper routes on top of a Mapbox powered map of the world.

The map includes some quick links to jump to the maps of a few major cities around the world and you can also pan and zoom the map to view the popular running routes at any location in the world. If you zoom in on the map you can view the recorded tracks right down to sidewalk level.


Tippecanoe was also used to help create A Month of Lightning, an interactive map of all 80,305,421 lightning strikes that occurred across the globe in May 2013.

Jordan Rousseau was able to use Tippecanoe to process the May 2013 lightning data from Weather Decision Technologies. The result is this impressive Mapbox map which allows you to view over 80 million global lightning strikes from just one month. You can read more about how the map was made in Jordan's blog post, Visualizing a Month of Lightning.